Why do people gesture when they speak?
Ez ősrégi, de nekem nem volt meg:
Why do all of us, regardless of our race, culture or language, wave our hands about when we speak? Why is it, for example, that when we are telling someone about pouring liquid, for example, we actually hold up a hand crooked into a ‘C’ shape and rock it back and forth a bit? Are we just following some sort of cultural convention and copying what, as children we saw others do to communicate similar concepts? Are we, for the benefit of the listener, visually illustrating the point that we are trying to get across verbally? Or does waving our hands about help us to think?
To begin to answer some of these questions Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow of Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana have carried out an intriguing series of observational experiments on congenitally blind children and adolescents.
They found that blind participants, even when speaking to blind listeners, used gestures of more or less the same shape and rate as those employed by their sighted counterparts when conveying the same concepts. Indeed, all the youngsters, sighted or not, used their arms and hands while speaking, whatever the visual status of their listeners.
October 30, 2011, 11:34pm
